Thirty
It was probably good, on balance, to have had children with someone who would eventually want shared custody.
Ryan had refused to leave the house the night that Shiloh tried to kick him out.
He’d sat on the couch with his arms folded. “I’m not leaving my children. I am not physically walking away from them. If you need to leave—leave!”
So Shiloh woke up the kids and strapped them into their car seats, both of them crying, while Ryan followed her around the
garage swearing the whole time that he wasn’t going to let her take them or the Subaru station wagon. Then he actually stood behind the car, so she couldn’t pull out.
Finally Shiloh got out and told him that he was traumatizing Junie in a way that she may never recover from.
“Or maybe you’re traumatizing her, Shiloh! By separating her from her father!”
They stood in the garage shouting at each other.
Somehow the story had shifted from what Ryan had done to what Shiloh was doing . This was about her hurting him . Ryan was a father, fighting for his family.
They only stopped shouting because Gus was screaming loud enough that they could hear him from outside the car—and Shiloh’s
breast milk had seeped through her bra and T-shirt.
“I’m not going to take them from you,” she’d promised Ryan. “We’ll work this out.”
And they had. It went like this:
Ryan had the kids for two weekdays, then Shiloh had the kids for two weekdays, then Ryan had them for the three weekend days. The next week, it switched.
It was a chaotic way to split the kids fifty-fifty—Shiloh couldn’t plan a consistent workweek around it—but it meant that
nobody went more than three days without seeing each other. And when Gus was still breastfeeding, Ryan had let Shiloh have
him every night.
Once Ryan realized that Shiloh wasn’t going to keep the kids from him, the rest of the divorce came together smoothly. (Or
came apart.) They sold the house and split their meager equity. Ryan earned slightly more money than Shiloh, so he paid a
small amount of child support.
Of their shared belongings, he wanted everything they’d bought new, and she wanted everything they’d bought old.
They’d fussed over Junie’s books and toys, and Gus’s baby equipment.
“The balls on this guy,” Shiloh’s mom had said. “He should have his tail between his legs, taking whatever you give him.”
But Shiloh figured that in the long term, the kids were better off having a dad who would fight for them—who was willing to
spend half his days taking care of them, all by himself.
She trusted Ryan to take care of Junie and Gus. He was sensitive and nurturing. He liked being a father.
Shiloh honestly believed that Ryan liked being a husband, too—he just wasn’t very good at it.
Maybe Shiloh hadn’t been very good at being a wife.
Shared custody meant that Shiloh’s nights were either loud and frantic, or long and quiet. She stayed late at work when Ryan
had the kids, and tried to do most of her errands and housework on those nights.
Ryan planned his longest rehearsals for his off nights. They both worked a lot of weekends and leaned on their families for
help, but they’d agreed to be present as much as possible when it was their turn to parent.
That’s what Shiloh hated about the arrangement—the feeling that she actually wasn’t a parent on off days. That her kids only had a mother for half their life.
Ryan could say the same thing, Shiloh supposed, but she found her own loss more compelling. She was their mother .
“You’re doing your best,” her own mother would say. (A woman who had never overly concerned herself with being present.)
But if Shiloh had been doing her best—her actual best—she wouldn’t have made the choices that led her here . To part-time parenthood.
She’d wanted to stay home with her kids. Now she was only home with them two nights a week and every other weekend. If she
thought about it that way, her whole life started to spin and swirl toward the drain. It was intolerable .
But what could she do, except tolerate it?
Off, off. On, on. Off, off, off.
When Mikey invited Shiloh over for dinner again, it wasn’t hard for her to find a free night.
It was better this time. He’d only invited Shiloh and another old high school friend, someone who’d grown up with Janine.
The talk of the night was the incoming baby. Plans and logistics. Janine worked as a writer for a travel industry magazine.
She was probably going to switch to freelance after her maternity leave. Mikey wasn’t a superstar by New York standards—he
claimed—but by Omaha standards, he was making a really nice living. They could manage it.
“I’m trying to talk other artists into moving here,” he said over dessert. (Apricot torte from a local bakery.) “They could
afford houses and studios—Omaha artists’ colony!”
“No one loves a colonist,” Shiloh said. “Our artist-to-sane-person ratio is perfect as it is.”
Later that spring, Janine’s sister threw a coed baby shower. Shiloh bought a set of vintage baby dishes at the antique mall—a little ceramic cup and bowl with lambs painted on them.
Her mother took one look at them and said, “Hopefully that’s not lead paint.”
Shiloh had inherited a love of old things from her mother, but her mom thought Shiloh went overboard. “It’s like you’re buying every single thing we threw out when your grandma died.”
When the baby came, Shiloh told Mike and Janine to call her if they needed any help. But they both had big families, and Janine
had her own friends. Shiloh went over to meet the baby—Otis—about a month after he was born. He was bald and healthy. Janine
seemed exhausted. Mikey said he was going to take more time off work, maybe two and a half months. That was longer than Shiloh
got at the theater for maternity leave.
Shiloh found herself feeling jealous of them. Not that she wanted another baby...
She was jealous of how right they seemed together. They were doing it right. They loved each other. (A fly on the wall would have said the same thing
about Ryan and Shiloh...)
And she was jealous of what they were offering Otis. The attention of two parents. The same house seven nights a week.
Shiloh didn’t like feeling this way. She was sort of glad that Mikey was too busy now to invite her to parties.